2021

Editor’s Note: Today marks the second annual National 311 Day. We talked with the City of San José’s CTO to learn about how they worked with Google.org Fellows to connect residents to the information they needed. 

National 311 Day is a day to remind communities nationwide to use 311, a resource to connect with their city’s non-emergency services. It’s an important tool that cities use to unburden 911 call-takers of non-emergency calls, allowing them to quickly respond to residents’ most urgent needs. It’s also a time to honor the hardworking call-takers, especially after the past year as they’ve worked tirelessly to connect millions of local residents to critical services during the COVID-19 pandemic. We like to say that 911 is for the burning building, and 311 is for the burning questions, like the latest information about COVID-19, who provides garbage and recycling services or how to report a water leak.

At the beginning of 2019 San José identified a clear problem: it was taking too long for first responders to answer 911 calls. The State of California requires that 95% of 911 calls be answered within 15 seconds, and San José fell short of this goal in 2017 and 2018. That’s when we reached out to Google for help and were selected for a Google.org Fellowship. Together, we worked with a team of pro bono full-time Google.org Fellows to reduce 911 and 311 response times, improve the customer service experience, make 311 more accessible to residents, and address the growing load on call centers with solutions like a machine learning-based virtual agent.

First, the Google.org Fellows talked to residents and analyzed call volumes to understand what was contributing to the issues. They shadowed over 60 hours of calls to identify the most impactful ways to improve the response time, how to educate residents about 311 services, and ways to make it accessible to the residents of San José. San José is also one the most diverse U.S. cities, with residents speaking more than 100 languages. This demanded a new approach to automating the intake of requests from a majority population whose first language is not English, so equitable access was also top of mind for the Google.org Fellows. 

Advertising plays an important role in helping publishers fund the content that people love to read, watch and play online. But it has become essential to evolve digital advertising practices to address people’s changing privacy expectations and keep online content accessible to everyone. We’re committed to helping publishers of all sizes navigate today’s privacy environment, and what lies ahead. With this in mind, today we’re sharing how we’re experimenting with new technologies to help our partners sustain advertising revenue as the web evolves.

People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. That’s why, as we shared last week, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products once third-party cookies are phased out. We believe the Privacy Sandbox is critical to a privacy-first future for digital advertising — one that protects users while still delivering results for publishers and advertisers. 

Over the past year, we’ve been teaming up with ecosystem partners to test new solutions, including privacy-preserving APIs that move away from tracking individuals across the web while maintaining advertising effectiveness. The great news is we don’t anticipate publishers will need to put in significant work to benefit from the Privacy Sandbox when it’s rolled out to the industry at large. Google Ad Manager and AdSense, for example, will use the public privacy-preserving APIs to build support for these solutions, so publishers don’t have to.

Activating first-party relationships

In addition to the Privacy Sandbox, we believe that publishers who have built first-party relationships with their audiences should be able to provide personalized ad experiences to those customers. That’s why we’re investing in — and empowering publishers to adopt — strategies that support those direct relationships.

Bringing first-party audiences to programmatic

When publishers have direct relationships with their audiences, they can use insights from those users’ interactions with their content to responsibly deliver relevant and helpful ads and earn more revenue. 

Today, many large publishers with existing first-party data strategies are using Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs) in Ad Manager to deliver personalized ad campaigns in a privacy-first way. This feature allows publishers to build custom audience segments, deliver campaigns via traditional reservations or Programmatic Guaranteed deals, and in turn, make more money. 

To enable publishers to further increase their inventory’s value, we’re working to help them expand the use of their PPIDs to more programmatic campaign types, including the Open Auction. We’ve begun testing this functionality and look forward to reporting progress.

Enabling first-party data for publishers of all sizes

We’re also experimenting with a new feature that will help publishers of all sizes more easily access the benefits of their first-party data in Ad Manager. With minimal technical effort, the solution will enable publishers to activate data from user engagement on their own sites. This capability will help publishers, who choose to use it, increase programmatic demand and the value of their audiences. We will share more on this experiment later this year.

Respecting publishers’ trusted connections

We’ve long supported trusted, direct relationships between publishers and buyers and want to ensure our ad products continue to enable those connections in a secure way. Additionally, we aim to provide partners with the flexibility and choice to implement the monetization strategies that best support their business goals. 

That’s why we’re experimenting with functionality that will provide publishers with the option to share encrypted signals directly with Authorized Buyers or Open Bidders with whom they already have a direct relationship. Publishers will have full control over what data is collected, and who can receive the signals. Google will not be able to read or decrypt the signals. Ad Manager will only act as an intermediary on behalf of the publisher to pass the signals to the third-party bidders they choose. We are currently testing this feature and look forward to sharing more details.

To maintain a vibrant and open publisher ecosystem that provides people with access to the diverse content they care about, we will continue to invest in technology that helps our partners succeed while protecting people’s privacy online. As we move forward in 2021, you can expect to hear more about how progress in the Privacy Sandbox can be applied to your business, as well as updates on the experiments we’ve shared today.

With all the change our world saw over the past year, people are relying more than ever on high-quality, updated information about the places around them — like if a nearby restaurant is open or if a local grocery store has updated hours.

To make sure your map reflects the real world, we make it easy for anyone with a Google account to contribute their local knowledge about more than 200 million places in Google Maps. These community-led updates help people everywhere make better decisions about what to do and where to go. And at the heart of the fresh information you see on Google Maps are Local Guides. This community of contributors who help others by updating Google Maps has reached a new milestone: 150 million Local Guides around the world. 

Today, we’re introducing three new Google Maps features that will help make sharing and finding local recommendations and information easier.

Leave reviews and updates as part of a community challenge

We see people showing love and support for local businesses in Google Search and Maps by leaving photos, writing reviews or updating factual information like a store’s new hours. We want to amplify that same local love with a feature we are now piloting.  

For the next month, most people using Android in the U.S. can join our first nationwide challenge to rally helpful reviews, photos and updates from sea to shining sea. Simply jump into the Contribute tab in Google Maps to join the “Local Love challenge” and add ratings, reviews and confirm information to support local businesses you’ve visited, from your go-to bakery to the neighborhood hardware store. Each contribution will count toward a collective goal of updating 100,000 businesses. We’ll use feedback on the Local Love challenge to guide future campaigns in more countries.

You might think you love pizza, but Miriam Weiskind truly loves pizza. She has given pizza tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn for Scott’s Pizza Tours for over eight years, runs a website and blog at the ‘Za Report, is active on Instagram at @thezareport and now makes her own pies for her local community — with a month-long waiting list. And while Miriam also runs a Brooklyn-based creative studio called mdoubleu Design, she is clearly a professional pizza enthusiast.

To help people around the world learn a bit about Miriam and her passion for pizza, the Google Web Creators team partnered with her on a Web Story showcasing a virtual pizza tour of Brooklyn. 

The story’s title page draws you in with a mouth-watering video of a pizza being tossed and baked. The personal introduction makes you feel like you’re right there with her. She also appears throughout the Web Story, offering her opinions on what makes each pizza great.

At Google, our mission has always been to make sure that information serves everyone in important moments, whether it’s helping you find a COVID vaccine near you or get a new job that creates a better life for you and your family.

For Rey Justo, the last year has been full of important moments. When the pandemic hit, he lost his job installing fireplaces in Sacramento, Calif., and he and his family had to move in with his grandparents. He had always been interested in technology, so he enrolled in the Google IT Support Certificate through Merit America. After completing the program in three months, he was hired as an apprentice at Zennify, a computer software company.

With more businesses embracing digital ways of working, it’s estimated that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. As U.S. job growth returns with more people getting vaccinated, we are committed to ensuring that all Americans have the skills they need to benefit from greater economic opportunity. To help, today we’re announcing new efforts, including opening up enrollment for our latest career certificates, expanding our employer consortium, and introducing new tools to improve the job search.

Enroll now: More Google Career Certificates

Starting today, enrollment is open for our latest Google Career Certificates, in the fields of Data Analytics, Project Management, and User Experience (UX) Design. We’re also announcing a new Associate Android Developer Certification, which prepares learners for entry level jobs in Android development. With 1.3 million jobs open in these fields right now in the U.S., the opportunity is significant.

We’re also providing 100,000 scholarships to be distributed through nonprofits, workforce development boards, and other community organizations such as Per Scholas, NPower and Goodwill. And we’re working closely with the National Association of Workforce Boards to make sure that local workforce programs, one-stop centers, and community employers know how to refer local job seekers to these certificate programs, as well as connect graduates to local jobs. 

These certificates have already been successful in bringing in more talent from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech: 53% of graduates of the IT Support Certificate in the U.S. have been female, Black, Latino or veterans. And 82% of graduates overall say the program helped them advance their career within six months, including getting a raise, finding a new job, or starting a new business. 

Get hired: Expanding our consortium to 130+ employers

More than 130 employers have joined our employer consortium, eager to hire people who have earned these certificates. Graduates can share their resumes directly with employers like Anthem, Verizon, Bayer, Deloitte, SAP, and Better.com, who are joining Accenture, Walmart, Infosys and, of course, Google. We’re also partnering with Guild Education, which works with Fortune 1000 companies, to bring Google Career Certificates to help some of the country’s largest employers upskill their workforce.

Not only is Google hiring these certificate graduates, we’re using the certificates themselves to upskill and reskill Google teams, from IT support techs to data analysts. We’re also opening applications for Google’s apprenticeship program in our Career Certificate fields in addition to a few other professional tracks. We will hire hundreds of apprentices over the coming years to participate in on-the-job training and applied learning.

Globally, we’re sponsoring 100,000 scholarships for our Career Certificates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In India, we’re working to make certificates more accessible and launch an employer consortium. And in addition to our Career Certificates, today we’re also making our cloud computing, big data and machine learning trainings free for U.S. job seekers to help prepare for jobs in these high-growth fields.

Improving the Job Search experience

For many job seekers, it can be difficult to find open roles that match their experience and education. Over the past year, Google Search queries like “great jobs without a degree” spiked 850% in the U.S. Now when you search for “no degree jobs” in the U.S., you’ll see a new job carousel highlighting relevant opportunities near you. You can also filter by education and experience requirements, and there will be new labels on positions that do not mention degrees in their requirements. We’re also working with job sites — including Glassdoor, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Snagajob and CareerBuilder — and U.S. employers to make education and experience requirements clearer on job postings.